The Elementals By Michael McDowell

The Elementals
By Michael McDowell
1981 Avon
Paperback, 292 pages

                McDowell strikes again with another fascinating, impeccably written gem of a horror book. While perhaps not on the level of the previous year’s Cold Moon Over Babylon (but then, what is?) this is a brilliant slice of Southern Gothic with quirky characters, unnerving tension and a sandy, haunted house.

 

                The Savages and the McCrays are two rich white families, joined by marriage, in southern Alabama who share a vacation property called Beldame out on a sandspit on the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, the Gulf of MEXICO. Each family has their own Victorian summer house there and a third house stands unoccupied, being consumed by a sand dune. After the Savage matriarch dies, the families take a June holiday to the property. Luker McCray and his daughter India come down from New York, joining his mother Big Barbara and his sister Leigh, who is married to Dauphin, the deceased woman’s son. Everyone has been to Beldame many times over the years except India; this is her first time. Also on hand is Odessa, the longtime housekeeper for the families.

 

                India gets very interested in the third house and finds that members of both families have a fear of it. This makes her even more obsessed and when she starts seeing things like doors closing and apparitions crawling through the sand, she is determined to learn more despite her own fear. Her photos show things that weren’t there when she took them. She finds out more from Odessa and between the two of them, they try to stop the Elementals, the force that is trying to take them over from the third house.

 

                McDowell’s characterization and dialogue is pure perfection, with a cast of mostly selfish, yet somehow likeable people. Everyone calls their parents by their first names, Luker and 13 year old India skinny-dip together, and Big Barbara finds everything easier to deal with being inebriated. Not your typical family gathering, but they are all fairly tight and when the supernatural starts acting up, their plight is all the more terrifying because of that. Odessa is easily the most grounded character. Sadly, McDowell points out countless times that she is “black”, like we wouldn’t remember that from the other dozens of times it was mentioned. That does fit the rich white folk narrative, however.

 

                The book is a slow burn, meeting and getting to know the families and their history along with the history of Beldame and that third house. When the horrors start taking over, it is pure McDowell mastery, with flowing sand and banging doors and many things going bump in the night. Despite a few things that might not have aged well, it’s impossible not to recommend this book. Nobody wrote horror better than McDowell.

The Amulet By Michael McDowell

The Amulet
By Michael McDowell
1979 Avon
Paperback, 340 pages

                It was high time that I delved into the work of Michael McDowell (1950-1999). Of course, I know Tim Burton’s film Beetlejuice (1988) for which McDowell wrote the story and screenplay, and Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas for which he adapted the screenplay, but I hadn’t read his books. I’m glad that I finally got around to it because this one, his debut novel, is great.

 

                Pine Cone, Alabama in the mid-Sixties is a slow moving, quiet town with a rigid class system and segregation. It’s only source of work is a munitions factory. Sarah Howell works there. Her husband Dean is drafted but is sent back home after a tragic accident with a gun made at that very factory. He is a bandage-wrapped vegetable who is kept company by his mother Jo, a loathsome bitch if there ever was one. This makes Sarah’s dull life even more miserable as she has to keep house for the three of them after a full day at the factory. Then, Jo gives an amulet to one of Dean’s visiting friends to give to his wife. Thus starts the horror.

 

                The amulet passes through a lot of hands in Pine Cone, from poor to rich, from white to black, from guilty to innocent. Everyone who has it in their possession dies in a violent and hideous manner. (My guess is that the Final Destination creators might have read this book.) You get houses burnings, ceiling fan decaps, a woman eaten by pigs, scalpings, suicides, babies in washing machines and all sundry of beautiful gore and grue. Sarah tries to figure out if the amulet is the cause and drags her friend Becca on her investigation, but nobody believes her preposterous story.

 

                Man, this book really made me turn the pages. Short chapters, thorough (but never boring) descriptions and authentic characters really put me into southern Alabama in the Sixties. Of course, still being segregated, the black population is “colored” but the characters are treated no different than the whites. There is some fat-shaming (Jo’s wickedness has a lot more with her nasty disposition than her weight) but overall, this is Sarah’s story and she is someone with whom I really felt in touch. Of course, most characters are there for the kill and you should know by now how much I love they get the old “set ‘em up, knock ‘em down” treatment. We get a huge body count in this one! And that cover by Don Ivan Punchatz is amazing!

 

                McDowell was a gifted writer and  this is the first time for me that a book has dialog with a Southern dialect that isn’t impossible to understand. No easy feat. Having just ended a job working for a jeweler for over 35 years, this might have been a “right place at the right time” read but I thought it was excellent and am already filling my TBR pile with more of McDowall’s books.